March 15 - World Consumer Protection Day

Every year on March 15, Kazakhstan celebrates the World Consumer Rights Protection Day. Within the framework of the World Consumer Rights Protection Day, a meeting with journalists was held in Nur-Sultan, at the Ministry of Trade and Integration of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Its main goal is to draw public attention to problems and innovations in this area.

Meanwhile, the consumer rights of Kazakhstanis are violated daily. In 2021 alone, the Consumer Protection Committee considered 25,223 appeals. Some of them were in the retail sector (55.4%), consumer services (15.2%), e-commerce (5.3%), housing and communal services (4.3%), transport (3%). As a result of the measures taken, more than 363 million tenge was returned to citizens.

Complaints grow like a snowball from year to year. And they reflect the illegal actions of the seller against the consumer. So, in the retail environment, refusals to return high-quality goods within 14 days (33.9%), failure to provide information about products (12.7%), refusals to repair /exchange defective goods (12.1%) are common.

In terms of household services, Kazakhstanis complained about unfair manufacture and repair of furniture (43%), installation of plastic windows (9.6%), poor service of hairdressers and cosmetology salons (6.7%).

Merchants from electronic platforms often provided second-rate goods (17.1%), deceived consumers (13.4%).

The list of claims of infringement of consumer rights is impressive. There are about a dozen of them only in the housing and utilities sector: poor quality of water supply, heat supply, electricity, gas supply (31.7%), unjustified charging for utilities (16.7%) and others.

In the transport industry, as a rule, passengers were denied refunds for canceled flights (13.6%), baggage rules were violated (12.3%) and queues when buying tickets for railway transport (7%).